Smart Glasses That Could Replace Your Smart Phone🙀
During their annual Meta Connect conference this year, Meta unveiled goodies galore, but the new Augmented Reality (AR) glasses named Orion were the event’s highlight. It’s a project they have been working on since 2019 under the name Nazare and finally, they have a prototype to show for it.
It’s an innovative improvement from their AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses. Orion has been touted as a device that can overlay digital information over the real world. Sounds crazy right? It’s basically a wearable computer. You can put on your glasses and leave your smartphone at home.
Looking at the features: The hardware will consist of 3 parts. It will include the actual glasses, a neural wristband for controlling them, and a wireless compute puck. Orion lenses are made of silicon carbide which is light and durable as compared to glass. Silicon Carbide is however expensive, and they will have to find an alternative when they get to mass production which is one of the biggest challenges they will be facing in the next stage of this project. The frames are made of magnesium and are fixed with micro-LED projectors to help beam graphics. It has 7 embedded cameras to enable more reality capture of objects as well as help anchor virtual objects. With all these you can of course predict that they are heavier than normal glasses but 98g is quite manageable and shouldn’t be a big deal.
The eyes, voice, and neural wrist band used for control. The eyes act as the “mouse” pointing device. The wristband uses EMG to interpret neural signals associated with the hand gestures. Snapping your thumb and the index finger acts like a left click while using your thumb to “coin-flip” is interpreted as scrolling, while the middle finger launches apps.During the showing casing Mark Zuckerberg indicated that although this a prototype, it is a fully usable device. They have also integrated META AI to make interactions smarter and more iterative. For example, they can suggest for you recipes depending on the ingredients on the table. They also plan for video integration. They are also looking to make the Orion glasses smaller, have a higher resolution, and brighter.
In short, the consumer version will be slightly different from the prototype. For those curious about the timings, you may need to wait until 2027 when the mass production and shipping begins. They are working on modalities on how to reduce the production cost so that you don’t have to break the bank to afford a pair of Orion. So, I guess it’s worth the wait for glasses that utilize enough computing power to make you leave your smartphone at home.
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